Michael White and John Gribbin

EINSTEIN

A Life in Science

This is a short biography of Einstein for the general reader with little
or no knowledge of science. There are no great surprises, but the
authors seek to counteract some recent allegations that Einstein was an
incorrigible womaniser, was totally neglectful of his family, or failed
to acknowledge that his first wife Mileva made an important contribution
to the special theory of relativity (it appears she just checked
Einstein's arithmetic). White and Gribbin appear to be puzzled about
why Einstein was attracted to Mileva in the first place, and are
unsurprised by his subsequent decision to divorce her and marry his
cousin Elsa, who provided the support he needed to get on with his
intellectual work without unnecessary distractions.

Einstein was one of those exceptional scientists who, like Stephen
Hawking today, become prototypes of what the public expect a genius to
be like. Part of the myth surrounding such figures includes the notion
that their ideas are so fantastically abstruse that no ordinary mortal
can hope to understand what they are talking about. White and Gribbin
rightly wish to show that this is nonsense; they insist that it is
indeed possible to express deep theories of physics in everyday
language, and on the whole they make their point, although some of their
descriptions, for example the account of the 'twins paradox', are
excessively brief and in consequence rather unclear.

The concluding section of the book deals with the long years that
followed the development of the general relativity theory. Inevitably,
these are something of an anticlimax, since Einstein spent this time
largely in trying, and ultimately failing, to provide an alternative to
the essential randomness of quantum mechanics. However, the authors
don't think all this effort was wasted, since it prompted Niels Bohr to
defend his position and counter the arguments which Einstein kept
producing to try to convince him he was wrong. It is also possible that
the current search for a comprehensive 'Theory of Everything' will
succeed and Einstein will be vindicated posthumously.